AX 2009 - Increasing the length of the Payment Journal Line 'Transaction Text' field

Question

I am looking to bring in some data from a text file that is generally 120 characters long, and place it in the Payment Journal Line - Transaction Text . Can I simply increase the String size of the LedgerJournalTrans.Txt field from 60 to 255 characters?

I don't know if that will affect anything else. Does any other section in Axapta use that field? How would I check?

Answer 1

This is a complicated and nuanced question in general. If you don't fully understand what you're doing it could create problems. Expanding a string is far safer than shortening. For that field, I think it's ok to just expand the EDT, but in order to confidently say that you need to test and research where the field is used.

I don't have an AX09 environment handy, so I'm using AX2012 table examples which may be different.

For example, you may extend the field on the table, but then when you post it and it that field is used by another table (AssetTrans\Fields\Txt) to store data, it may truncate it unless that table's field is extended as well.

So you would want to extend the EDT and not merely the field on the table. You would look at the EDT on the table and find it in the AOT and expand it then DB sync.

EDT's can extend other EDT's too, so in AX2012 the EDT is LedgerJournalTransTxt, which extends TransTxt.

Imagine a scenario where a developer was lazy or used TransTxt instead of LedgerJournalTransTxt. When your 255 string gets passed to a function that is using the shorter TransTxt, it would get truncated. So then do you expand TransTxt? What impact does that have?

It depends. That's where researching and understanding the impact is important, otherwise things will work normally for a while then you'll end up having a user report truncated data and you'll have to track it down to find the source (if you can), expand the target, and write a job or something to push forward the original values. It can just be a can of worms if you're not confident in the impact.

I would build the cross reference and see where the EDT is used to see the impact it might have. You may be extending a field from 60 -> 255 on many fields throughout the entire database.

All of that said, my gut feeling with that specific EDT is it would probably be fine to just extend it...but do your checks.